Rapid Calibration for Operational and Strategic Digital Twins

Digital Twins offer a compelling opportunity to improve the life-time efficiency of assets and systems enabling flexibility in design, up-front risk minimisation and in-use performance enhancement through techniques such as predictive analytics and machine learning. A number of critical gaps exist that currently prevent the wide-spread use and adoption of digital twins in game-changing contexts such as large-scale infrastructure systems or within the enterprise. With applications at scale currently out of reach, many strategic, cost, efficiency, operational performance and risk management benefits are not being realised. The UK has the opportunity to lead this disruptive sector, exploiting emerging technology from our world-class research base. The research identified within this project enables the rapid calibration and validation of large-scale Digital Twin models across a range of contexts. Our project uses these game-changing, disruptive approaches and access to large-scale, real-time data sets to create a new "System of Intelligence" capable of rapidly calibrating and validating real-world models, delivering incredible levels of efficiency, productivity and insights. This System of Intelligence will enable vast improvements to predictive capability over both a strategic and operational time-horizon with applications in any situation where advanced mathematical modelling is required. It will therefore put advanced mathematical modelling into the hands of those who need it when they need it vastly reducing the need for complicated design and calibration. The system will enable us to learn more about critical feedback loops, developing models that are more accurate and more dynamic. This system will provide a globally game-changing proposition within Enterprise software applications, as well as revolutionising the way we model infrastructure systems, supply chains and manufacturing environments driving radical improvements to productivity. As such it will propel the UK and the consortium to a position of global leadership within this fast-growing new market, anchor critical IP within the UK and create significant additionality, including 795 new jobs by 2023\.